I posted this on reddit but I think discussion mainly happens here so i’ll post this here.
Basically, i’m a blind wanna-be blogger looking for good themes to use. While the themes website does a great job of describing the features of the themes, it doesn’t quite give me information on how the theme looks esthetically (I don’t expect it to, don’t get me wrong-for 99.99% of cases it’s perfectly valid to not do so, i’m just describing my problem)
So what I would love is some recommendations on themes for a personal blog. A one-line description (or bigger, whichever you prefer) of how the theme looks like generally would be even more helpful, but not required.
Thanks a lot for the recommendations. Filtering by the blog tag is pretty useful, but doesn’t really solve the problem of how the theme looks. I did get to look at the themes I missed in the all themes list though, so that was helpful.
I don’t think requiring a textual description for every theme should be a hard requirement-mine is kind of an edge case, and most people can just look at the theme and judge that way. Maybe a “soft” requirement, if there’s such a thing?
Anyway, i’m off to look at the recommended themes Another thing I forgot to say in my previous post: thanks a lot for Hugo! i’ve been loving it (and the documentation, specifically) a lot.
P.S. I was looking at After Dark. Is this a good theme to get started with as well?
Yes, After Dark is also a nice clean blog theme. It has, as the name indicates, black background – the body text is white with some pink contrasting links.
@digitalcraftsman Please let me know how I can help with the descriptions. @darbaga all of @bep 's recommendations are great, but would you mind telling me a bit more about the nature of what you’re going to write (only if you’re comfortable, of course)? Then the three of us can pick one that is both blog-friendly and does your content some justice
I’m mainly going to write about tech…but this blog isn’t really focused on one topic. I’m going to have ‘life’ and ‘ramblings’ category as well, for interesting stuff that happened and interesting stuff I think writing an essay about would help me understand, respectively.
Honestly, blogging is mostly just a way for me to write-I’m sure my blog will go through lots of iterations before I find my niche
A screenshot should tell more than a thousand words. Is a short description really able to describe the look and feel of a theme better than a screenshot?
It should be faster to overfly a few dozen screenshots than reading short descriptions for each theme.
Maybe I don’t get the point of the discussion. Feel free to enlighten me
Beautiful Hugo. This is again a really minimal black-and-white theme as well. It’s ported over from a popular jekyll theme, but it goes beyond a bit more than a blog in that it offers menu items like “Resources”, “About Me”, and a “Support Me” in the site header, which is stick and has some very minimal transition as the user scrolls down the page.
Cocoa. This is about as minimalist as it gets. It’s just a very white screen with a single column and a small circular image on the top left for the author. There is also a “code” section built into the demo site, but I’m not sure if you’re considering code blocks for the tech content you mentioned.
Cactus. I will let @digitalcraftsman explain this one. He did a really nice job of porting this over.
I think the ones @bep and I both recommended are very similar in that there is a minimalist tone to all of them. This could be a good approach since a) you are the only writer, b) you (maybe) are just getting started with writing posts for this new blog, and c) you want to cover a diverse range of topics and don’t want for your content to clash with something too specific.
In the future, if you find you’ve written a lot of content that organically grows into a specialized area, definitely come back and see all the cool new contributions that have come up from the community. We’ll work on the descriptions for sure. Cheers.
